Matthew Kessler 0:01
There’s a normal enough looking building in central China - in a small city along the Yangtze River. Windows run top to bottom in a measured grid. It’s 26 stories tall. But inside, the main residents aren’t people. They’re pigs. At full capacity, more than a million pigs can be raised and processed here each year.
The New York Times called it a “high-rise hog farm.” When I read about this three years ago, my first thought was “what could make something like this necessary?”
Because buildings like this don’t appear out of nowhere. They're an answer to the question: how do you feed more people, more safely, using less land?
But is it the right answer? Is this the future of livestock farming, or a disaster waiting to happen?
This is Episode 2 of Feeding 1 in 6. How to feed 1.4 billion people pork. Presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler.
In Chinese, the character for home (家, jiā) is a pig under a roof. For most of Chinese history, that's literally what it meant. A household that didn't have a pig wasn't really a household. The pig ate your scraps, fertilized your garden, and once a year on Spring Festival became the meal.
And now, there’s this:
Ron Lane 01:37
When you look at the picture of those farms, you go -oh, it just looks like a hotel. But on the end you’ll see a bank of fans. You’ll see pigs coming out and going in, they go up the elevator. In one site, I think it's 20 barns, eight stories high. Five thousand sows in each one. So there's 100,000 sows just in this one complex. So then they have these clusters. If you look at a map, they're everywhere in China, basically.
Matthew 02:11
In this episode, we’re going inside China’s pork industry, which produces about half of the world’s pork. We’re going to find out how farms like this came to be, what happened to the household pig, and how China’s appetite for pork is reshaping agriculture on the other side of the world.
This is a transition that happened fast.
Ron 02:34
Like when I first came here, probably 90% of the farms are what we call backyard farms, one or two pigs. One or two sows. Maybe there'd be 3 to 5% commercial farms, and that would be like 500 sows.
Matthew 02:48
Today, these numbers are reversed.
Ron 02:51
Now there's maybe 1-2% backyard farms. And now the commercial operations, I think if you look at the top 10 producers in this country, would produce 20% of the pigs in this country.
Matthew 03:04
That's Ron Lane. He'll be our main guide for this episode.
Ron 03:08
My name is Ron Lane and I'm a Canadian, and have been in China for 26 years. Mostly an agricultural consultant — mainly in the pig business. From equipment, feeds, technical training, recommendations on swine breeding and genetics.
Matthew 03:26
Ron originally came with a project run by the Canadian International Development Agency, introducing purebred swine genetics into China. He arrived to a very different production system than what exists today. These buildings are precisely engineered, with every floor serving a different purpose. The upper floors house sows, female pigs that have had at least one litter. And the lower floors are for different stages of a pig's development.
Ron 03:55
So maybe gilts and early bred sows would be on the top. And then the gestation barn, and then there'll be the farrowing barn, and then there'll be the nursery barn. And then the bottom floors will be growers. And feed is coming in from conveyors from outside into this system.
Matthew 04:14
Ron talks about all of this without strong emotions. No awe, no horror, just the system described as it is. Which I personally find useful in understanding the system’s logic.
If you want to see what this looks like, we’ll link to pictures in the show notes. To me, they look like old soviet-style apartment blocks. The most striking detail is just how enormous they are compared to the tiny buildings around them.
It wasn’t that long ago that none of these existed. And a generation or two before, Chinese diets looked completely different.
People in China ate whatever was available, and that added up to around 4 kilograms of meat a year. That’s across all animals. Today the average person in China eats close to 40 kilograms of pork alone.
To put that in perspective: people from the US have quadrupled how much meat they’ve eaten in that time, and they eat about 1.5 times to twice as much meat overall as people in China. In the US chicken dominates. But in China, pork is king - eaten at roughly double the rate of chicken, and four times the rate of beef.
China's pork consumption per person is basically at European levels. Multiply that by 1.4 billion people, and you get an industry that produces close to 700 million pigs a year.
Part 1 - Biosecurity: a chicken and egg situation
Matthew 05:59
There was a time before African Swine Fever, and a time after.
Ron 06:11
I think it was the first week of August 2018 — ASF, African Swine Fever, came to China.
Matthew 06:11
African Swine Fever doesn't really affect humans. But it kills virtually every pig it infects. In 2018 and 2019, hundreds of millions of animals died or were culled. This was the largest animal disease outbreak in recorded history. It was a real inflection point for China's industrial pork sector. And how China's government and industry chose to respond brought us to today's systems.
I want to first put this moment in context, and see what pig production in China looked like before African Swine Fever arrived. Because the disease outbreak didn't happen in spite of how modern pig farming works. It happened, at least in some part, because of it. Industrial animal farming — where thousands of genetically uniform animals are packed into enclosed spaces and moved through dense networks of trucks and markets — creates something pretty close to ideal conditions for a pathogen to find its host. For a disease to emerge. With animals under that kind of stress, and with that little genetic diversity, the pigs have limited ability to mount a defense. So it's worth naming that the intensive production system itself generates public health risks alongside the enormous amounts of food it produces.
And because of this health vulnerability, the industry has responded by administering antibiotics preventively to keep densely housed animals healthy. Globally, around two thirds of all antibiotics used are given to farm animals, not people. When used at this scale, resistant bacteria develop. And they tend to escape the farm — through meat, water, and farm workers themselves — gradually making antibiotics less effective for treating humans. China's response to ASF wasn't to get out of this chicken-egg cycle. Instead, it was to double down. Larger farms, tighter controls, extra layers of biosecurity.
Ron 08:20
All these large farms, and even smaller farms, have hired personnel to be designated to look after the biosecurity.
Matthew 08:28
That biosecurity response was sweeping. China completely overhauled its protocols. Since the virus can survive on surfaces, in vehicles, even on the packaging of feed bags, the measures went further than you might expect.
Ron 08:43
We had to heat the feed bags. We had to put them in a tarp that was covered, and we had to put heat in there to make sure everything was burnt off. And then they go into a special quarantine area before they put onto the farm. And they put up bins outside the farm, and had trucks inside for delivery.
Matthew 09:02
Let's go back to the moment ASF arrived within China's borders in August 2018. Because the immediate response was just as revealing.
Ron 09:12
Generally speaking, I believe it came through some illegally imported meat, came to a small area, it was disseminated. All of a sudden, pigs started dying. The government reacted quickly, closed off a three kilometer designated area, and killed all the animals within that area. But as farmers weren't getting compensated at the time, they just took the pigs and went everywhere, and pretty soon African Swine Fever showed up in the very southwest of China.
Matthew 09:42
The government had the right instinct — contain it fast, kill the pigs within a quarantined area. But without compensation, the policy created the very spread it was trying to prevent. Farmers did the rational thing, and they moved their pigs. In a country with hundreds of millions of large and small farms — with constant movement of people, trucks, and animals between villages and markets — it only took a few months for the disease to cross the entire country.
China's biosecurity response led to high-rise hog farms, with quarantined entry and exit and an extensive monitoring system. This became the state and industry answer to the question: how do you produce pigs at scale while keeping disease out? Enforcing these new biosecurity protocols didn't just impact the everyday lives of farmers, farmworkers and supply chain workers. It also raised the bar for what types of farms could survive in this new normal. ASF accelerated a shift that was already underway — from tens of millions of small pig farms and hundreds of local breeds, towards fewer farms, fewer breeds, and far fewer people involved.
Part 2 — What's being replaced
Li Zhang 11:19
In Guangxi, each household, whoever stays in the countryside, they would have pigs in their backyard.
Matthew 11:28
That's Li Zhang, an assistant professor at Amherst College in sociology and environmental studies. Li spent several years in the 2010s documenting what these traditional systems looked like on the ground, just as they were beginning to change.
Li 11:45
I still remember the first time, when I got there, I was kind of scared to go through that kind of curvy and rocky mountain and get into the deep mountain.
Matthew 11:56
The mountainous region made roads tougher to build and kept the outside world at a greater distance. So change arrived later in Guangxi. When Li first arrived in the 2010s, the village still resembled something closer to a traditional system — a system that dates back thousands of years.
Li 12:14
If you look at the Chinese character, 家, jiā. The pigs and humans live under the same roof.
Matthew 12:22
The pig wasn't just food, it was part of the household. And having it there made a lot of sense. The pig cleaned up kitchen scraps, ate the stalks of vegetables grown around the home, and its manure fertilized the garden. Li caught the village at a transition moment where the value of the traditional pig in a modern world was being questioned. The outside market had just started to arrive. And farmers were starting to test commercial pig breeds alongside their traditional ones.
Li 12:52
Oftentimes I saw these two kinds together in the same space. Of course they have the regular, chiang bi zhu, the longer variety.
Matthew 13:04
This is a commercial breed, which is fed soybean meal and corn and grows to slaughter weight much faster. And next to that, you'd have a traditional breed.
Li 13:13
The black ones, or the ones they name ziang xiang zhu. It's kind of shorter and fattier. Relatively slower growing pig than the commercial ones. So they will say the local variety of pig is mostly for their festival food, because they prefer that kind of culinary flavor - and more fatty.
Matthew 13:37
Because of its diet and its anatomy, the pork from the local breeds was significantly fattier. And that had its own value beyond just the flavor. After the slaughter, the lard was saved and used throughout the year to fry vegetables. Today that jar of lard has been replaced by soybean oil — often made from the same imported soybeans that now feed the commercial pig. In the 2010s in Guangxi, the logic of markets arrived. Li told me about an older couple she met who had raised 12 roosters themselves. Instead of eating them directly, they brought them to market.
Li 14:22
They sold 12 roosters to a middleman with price like per pound, 20 yuan per pound. And then immediately they went to the market to buy like 10 yuan per pound, or 12 yuan per pound of the imported chicken.
Matthew 14:41
So they bought the chicken for half of the price of what they just sold the roosters for, and pocketed the rest of the money.
Li 14:49
So they knew the taste is different, but they need the cash for other kind of stuff. At the end of the day you need to eat and at the end of the day you have to find a better paid job. With the cheapening of peasant labor in the past three decades, and the higher price of education and healthcare, who can stay on a farm?
Matthew 15:20
This way of farming hasn't disappeared entirely. There are still somewhere between 150 and 200 million smallholders. But it has become much harder to sustain. And in many parts of China, it has been replaced by something very different. The same consolidation that happened to farming in Europe and North America over the course of the 20th century was now happening in China. Only here it was compressed into just a few decades.
Part 3 — Big by design
Matthew 16:51
In a few decades, China moved overwhelmingly from backyard farms to large-scale industrial farms, from widespread food shortages to producing half the world's pork supply. This shift toward larger, more centralized farms was in significant part a policy decision. Beginning in the late 1990s, the Chinese government deliberately set out to reshape the industry through what was called 'Dragon head enterprises'. These were handpicked companies to lead the industrialization of agriculture. You can picture a small regional pig farm that shows promising signs of scaling up. It then catches the eye of a provincial official. Suddenly it has access to subsidised land, cheap credit, policy support, R&D funding, and a government mandate to grow. That's the Dragon Head model. And part of that strategy meant bringing in outside expertise, including agricultural consultants from Canada like Ron Lane.
Ron 17:13
When I first came here, there was still a lot of interest in just helping farmers to learn more about educating them on pig farms. So we would go out to the countryside. We'd have three or 400 small farmers show up to a meeting. We put up presentations and give them small booklets, and that was the only information they could receive. Then, as time progressed, the government of China wanted to have more specialized farms, commercial farms, mainly, as they put it, for disease prevention.
Matthew 17:43
This shift towards large-scale specialized commercial farms didn't happen overnight. It moved through several stages. I want to start with breeding and genetics. The traditional breeds Li described were well-suited to a household system built around kitchen scraps and seasonal slaughter. They were the wrong animal for what the industry was becoming.
Ron 18:06
We had a mixture of some breeds coming from Britain, from the United States, Denmark, Yorks, landrace and Duroc, and they were mixing them with different ones.
Matthew 18:19
These breeds were selected to convert feed into flesh more efficiently — to grow faster and to reach slaughter weight sooner. This had both economic and environmental gains. More profit and fewer greenhouse gasses per animal.
Ron 18:36
So our development was on the York landrace and Duroc, which is now the prevalent breed of the 700 million pigs that are slaughtered here each year — probably 650 million of them will be a York Landrace-Duroc.
Matthew 18:53
The Yorkshire breed Ron introduced — named after York in the UK — was itself originally developed in the 1800s by crossing large English pigs with smaller, faster-maturing Chinese pigs. So two centuries later, those western genetics — refined partly from Chinese stock — were being reintroduced into China. But to reach this growing demand for animal protein, they needed to change more than just their genetics. So next they turned to the pig's diet.
Ron 19:27
I did a lot of explaining of feeding grass, sweet potato tops and cabbage leaves, how much I had to feed to a pig. And I'm going, like, "that's a lot of work, isn't it, for a couple of pigs." And I said, "Why don't you look at how we do it in North America if you want to get serious." And, you know, some pre mix minerals and vitamins, some corn, soybean and make a ration for them, and then you'll see the results are better.
Matthew 19:54
The pitch went something like this: you've got to invest more up front, but you'll get higher yields and higher returns on investment down the line. The farmers who were already a bit larger, a bit more commercially-minded, saw the opportunity.
Ron 20:10
That's how we worked with the small, specialized households, because they were interested in growing the business, and they knew that they had to become modernized and use better technology and better feeds in order to get there. And so they combine the genetics, the feed, equipment and management. And so they were able to grow their industries from small farms. Pretty soon they have up to 50 sows, 100 sows, 200 sows, 1000 sows, and now some of them run a million sows, okay? The largest farm in China has 3.23 million sows.
Matthew 20:52
The Dragon Head model explains how you go from a few hundred sows to a few million. You first find the operations already showing signs of scale, you back them with substantial state resources, and let the market do the rest. It's this hybrid capitalist-socialist model where the state is choosing and supporting the winners to build out its national industrial strategy. China has used a similar approach across its industrial policy. You can look at electric vehicles and solar panels, which in under a decade and a half, has reached 70% of global market share.
This didn't happen all at once. Different regions moved at different speeds and not all local pilots were successful and scaled. But over time, more and more consolidation occurred, which wasn't just a market outcome — it was pretty much the point. This led to tens of millions of smallholders exiting farming. Some were incorporated into these systems through contracting arrangements, but if they couldn't scale and compete, they had to get out.
Ron 22:04
Farmers weren't making enough money so they moved on and became workers in the cities. Most of them became construction workers or workers for manufacturing or factory industries.
Matthew 22:16
We'll go deeper into what happens to these left-behind farmers and villages in the next episode. The Dragon Head policy was a push from the state. But there was also a pull from the market. Because it wasn't only the farm size that was increasing, it was single companies wanting to control more of the value chain. The logic of vertical integration — where a single company might control breeding, feed, processing and production — was hard to resist.
Ron 22:48
You either were a feed company, or you had a livestock farm, or you were a slaughterhouse or a processor. Those were the groups. But then the feed mill said, "well, our margins are getting tighter, our feed consumption is lower, so why don't we build some farms and feed our farm, plus some other customers." Or the farm decided to buy a feed mill, or the farm said, "well, why don't we do slaughtering and processing." And then all of a sudden, you see this whole chain of the large company build its own feed mills, started its own breeding farms. And so now you see this massive integration, where they go from farm to fork. And many of them are now building lots of meat shops, or restaurants, and supplying that from their farms as well.
Matthew 23:38
Once you have the genetics, the feed, and the management in place — the only question left is scale. It's how you end up with 3.23 million sows belonging to the Muyuan Foods group.
Ron 23:55
And when I first met him, Mr. Qin started in, I think it was 90 something, with 20 pigs in the backyard. You know, he was a teacher, and after school, he looked after them. And then when I first met him, in the early 2000s, he had bought some breeding stock. He had like 600 sows, and now he has 3.2 million, which is exactly one half of the US total sow population.
Matthew 24:21
It's kind of hard to believe that number. But it is real and verified. And it helps explain how China feeds 18% of the global population with around 9% of the world's farmland. There's something we haven't talked about yet. Feeding this many pigs requires an enormous amount of feed. It takes six to nine calories of animal feed to produce one calorie of edible pork. Feed accounts for around 70% of the cost of producing pork. And China cannot grow enough feed at home to sustain this system. That gap — between what China needs and what it can grow — is where this story goes global.
Part 4 — The global supply chain
Matthew 25:48
The high-rise hog farm doesn't just sit in China. It's at the end of a supply chain that starts thousands of kilometers away, on soybean farms in Brazil that most people in China will never see. To understand that chain, I spoke with a geographer who spent more than 15 years researching this relationship.
Gustavo Oliveira 26:13
My name is Gustavo Oliveira. I'm Assistant Professor of Geography at Clark University. I've been doing research on Brazil-China relations with a focus on trade and investments in agribusiness, infrastructure and finance, and a big piece of that, of course, is the soy sector that feeds into China's massive pork and livestock industry.
Matthew 26:31
Soybeans are one of the top traded agricultural commodities. In 2023, Brazil exported $55 billion worth of agricultural products to China, two-thirds of which were soybeans.
Gustavo 26:41
That is definitely one of the largest commodity flows in the world today.
Matthew 26:46
By value, there is no larger agricultural trade flow between any two nations. In just the last 15 years, Brazil has nearly doubled the land dedicated to soy production, driven in large part by one country’s demand. The latest available data I could find shows that in 2024 46 million hectares are growing soybeans in Brazil. That’s basically the size of the entire country of Spain.
When those beans arrive in China, they go to processing facilities and are run through equipment called crushers. These extract the oil and separate the solid soy meal. The oil goes primarily into cooking with some going into biofuel and industrial products. Three-quarters of soy globally goes into animal feed, and that reason for that is pretty simple: as an ingredient, it's really hard to match soy's nutrition and protein profile.
I was interested to ask Gustavo about how China has strategically gained influence and control of a supply chain it once had no power over. Let's start in Brazil, where soy has two different histories depending on the region it's grown. In the south, farms are smaller by Brazilian standards — a few hundred hectares — and the farmers there have a long tradition of cooperatives. In the center and north, Gustavo says that a different history produced a very different landscape.
Gustavo 28:09
As soybean expanded during the 20th century from the south of Brazil towards the central highlands — towards the Cerrado-Amazon frontier zone, such as Mato Grosso state — the scale of production increased dramatically. This has to do with the way the military dictatorship put down peasant demands for agrarian reform and land redistribution, and subsidized, economically as well as politically, the establishment of massive farms. You will regularly find farmers operating 2,000, 3,000 hectares. And since the 2000s, and accelerated in the 2010s, you see not individual farmers, but farm management companies that will operate farms — sometimes a unit of production will be at 10,000 hectares, 20,000 hectares. I have known farms where they have 50,000 hectares.
Matthew 29:08
To give you a sense of scale, that single farm is about the same size as nine Manhattans. So let's follow the bean now from farm to the crushing facility in China. When soy is harvested, it first moves through a chain of warehouses and ports. And whoever controls that chain controls the price.
Gustavo 29:29
A farmer in the center or the north of the country that farms several thousand hectares will harvest his soy, sell it to whatever warehouse in the region might offer him the best price. And once the soybean falls into a Cargill warehouse, or nowadays perhaps into a COFCO Chinese-owned warehouse, it is out of that farmer's mind and into these transnational trading company systems. These transnational trading companies, by controlling the warehouses deep inland and controlling the ports, which are the key strategic nodes, are able to set the prices for the farmers, are able to compete with each other over prices and market access. They basically take it from there.
Matthew 30:17
For most of the history of this trade, China was on the receiving end of that system. A price taker, not a price maker. The warehouses, the ports, the profits — those belonged to four western trading companies: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. Collectively known in the industry as the ABCDs.
Gustavo 30:41
From the late 1990s, as China was preparing to enter the WTO, and in the early 2000s when China began to rely upon soybean imports at a rapid and growing scale, Chinese companies did not control any port terminals in Brazil. They did not have any presence in the warehouses domestically. They could not originate soy. They could only buy from Brazilian exporters or the ABCDs. The main difference since 2016 especially has been COFCO’s ability to do origination.
Matthew 31:18
This is a bit technical, but really important. Origination, in the grain trade, means controlling the soy from the moment it leaves the farm. Without it, you're buying whatever arrives at your port, at whatever price the seller sets. China's response to this was to build its own version of the ABCD system. Its state-owned trading company COFCO began acquiring warehouses and port terminals in Brazil in 2016. Now they could set the price with the farmer at the moment of purchase, and manage that grain all the way to the crushing facility in China. To understand why that matters, you need to know how the soy trade actually works. It doesn't run the way most people imagine — where a farmer sells a bag of beans, it gets shipped, and someone buys it at the other end. Instead, it runs on futures contracts. The price a farmer gets today, the price paid when the grain reaches the port, and the price when it finally arrives in China, are three different prices, set at different moments, sometimes months apart.
Gustavo 32:31
By controlling all of this, what COFCO is able to do — which it wouldn't be able to do if it was simply just paying for the purchase that arrives at its port in China — is that it is able to speed up or slow down, redirect, and consider the profitability of the supply chain as a whole.
Matthew 32:54
Controlling the whole chain means you can buy from a Brazilian farmer today at a locked-in price, wait for the market to move in your favor, and sell in China at a higher price. You can hold grain back when prices are low. And you can redirect shipments to wherever they'll fetch the best return. The deeper your control of the chain, the more of those moments you can exploit. That's the business model the ABCDs built over decades. It's what COFCO has been building since 2016. It's worth being clear what's actually at stake here, which is more than just profits and cheaper soy. It's part of China's broader strategy to manage its own risk in the face of a trade war or geopolitical shocks. Think about the war in Ukraine, trade tensions with the United States, instability across the Middle East. A country that controls its own supply chain is a country that's harder to squeeze. In 1995, China was a net exporter of soy. In 2025, China was importing around 60% of globally traded soy. Another way to think about this: China is importing land. The nation lacks the arable land to grow enough soy within its borders to feed its pigs and chickens. So it has responded by gaining more influence over the supply chain. But that's only part of the story. What that costs — to the ecosystems where the soy is grown, to the farmers on both sides — is a question we'll soon return to. For now, all of those pieces — the animal feed, the genetics, the capital and infrastructure — they come together under the same roof.
Part 5 — Literally vertically integrated
Matthew 35:12
Muyuan Foods is the largest pork producer in the world, raising over 100 million pigs a year. Here's what the largest farm, with 3.23 million sows, looks like.
Ron 35:49
Well, he has, like, I think 20 farms. They're all multiple story buildings. In one site, it's like, I think it's 20 barns, eight stories high. He has like 5,000 sows in each one of them. So there's 100,000 sows just in this one complex. And feed is coming in from conveyors from outside into this system. There's all smart feeding. He has his own research and development company to do all that. And he works with the telecom, the Huaweis, helping to develop software for them to monitor everything that goes on in their farm.
Matthew 36:07
The first high-rise hog farms were experimented with in the 90s. Though they were more open, and had risks with biosecurity. So they’ve been tweaking and improving the model over time. Now it has become an exact science. Some call it smart farming or precision farming.
Ron 36:41
They've got camera systems. They've got sensors — coughing, audible sensors, so if a pig's coughing, you can tell if that's a cough, that's just a cough, or is there some kind of preemptive thing that we need to do to stop that coughing and check all the animals. They have infrared cameras to sense estrous cycling. They have behavior monitors. They watch what the pig is doing. So if the temperature goes up, then maybe the sow is ready or the gilt is ready for breeding.
Matthew 37:14
They've also created automated, optimized feeding systems. What that means is they can adjust feed protein levels and amino acid content in real time based on each of the pigs' growth stage. To capture and implement this, they're using a lot of data. This is one of the ways AI is helping with farm management decisions. Another is with robotics.
Ron 37:35
They have automatic cleaners that go into the room and spray wash everything. Nobody goes into the room. It's all done by machine, you know?
Matthew 37:51
Which brings us to the labor dimension.
Ron 38:02
Labor has become much higher as an expense on the farm. To retain people, to stay on the farms, you're almost like you're in prison. You can't go in and out. You have to stay in there. You maybe stay for two months, and you get two or three days out.
Matthew 38:12
I forgot to mention that in between the pregnant pigs and the ones nearing slaughter is a recreational floor for the workers, complete with a gym and ping pong tables. It's probably not a surprise to you that this hasn't solved their labor issues.
Ron 38:39
And so they're using cameras and automatic sorters and automatic weighers so that they can eliminate some of the labor shortage that they may have on the farm.
Matthew 44:00
There's an irony in all of this that Ron points out. The more automated these farms become, the more they risk losing the people who actually know what they're looking at.
Ron 44:21
You know all these farms are getting all this modern technology, but they may lose their practical skill. Because you still have to go in, you still have to know a little bit about the pig industry in order to make it work. You can't just look on a machine and say okay, "It says it's okay, but it's been dead for three days." You have to be cognizant of what goes on.
Matthew 44:46
This is the point in the story where, journalistically, I'd want the pig's perspective. But the universal translator app hasn’t advanced that far yet.
There's a whole range of views on animal ethics and welfare, and they differ significantly across cultures. I asked a number of the experts I spoke to about Chinese attitudes toward animal welfare in these systems. Many of them brought up that for a country with famine in recent memory, there’s much greater concern for a hungry human than a mistreated animal. Others pointed to the health of the animal, the argument being that a healthy pig is a pig with good welfare.
Peter J. Li, author of the book Animal Welfare in China, argues that many who see Chinese people as indifferent to animal welfare are missing the point. His argument is that it's a product of the post-1978 development model - one that deliberately prioritized efficiency and food security over welfare. It's a policy choice made in a particular historical moment, and not an expression of timeless cultural values. But Peter Li also sees this as changing. A new generation of urban Chinese consumers, shaped by food safety scandals and exposure to different ideas, is driving a growing animal protection movement. For now, that concern is focused more on wildlife and companion animals than on farmed ones.
Animal ethicists would add one more frame: if you're going to farm these animals, the most humane system is one that allows them to express their natural behaviors. And here, this system fails that test. Minimal access to sunlight. No mud for rooting. Not a real expression of their piggyness. Which brings us to another natural behavior. Pooping.
Ron 40:46
Manure management has always been a factor here. The government came out with new regulations on controlling the ammonia emissions from manure and from farms. So that'll put a pressure on the farms to reduce that now.
Matthew 41:01
You might remember some barns or buildings have over 10,000 pigs in each. That's a lot of waste. And managing it has become its own engineering challenge. But that problem has been turned into an electricity generating business opportunity. Ron explains how that works.
Ron 41:22
Of course, the manure then goes into a pit liquid system. Makes up a slurry. Pull the plug, it goes into a huge tank, and then that tank then goes into the biogas. So the biogas is a rubber balloon covering the pit, and then there's a corner where the gas is collected, and then use that gas to run a generator, which then runs their farm. Sometimes they have enough to sell to the grid, and sometimes they just have enough to manage the farm electricity. If they don't have that, then waste is either composted, or waste is given to the farmers to spread out where they have green land, or farmland where they have big tanks that they spread the manure onto the land. But the biogas, anaerobic digesters are very common on the large farms, and there was lots of support for that many years ago, but you still see the support from the government and from agencies to do that.
Matthew 42:28
There's something almost elegant about this system when you describe it on paper. It's a real engineering feat. Waste becomes gas. Gas becomes electricity. Electricity runs the farm. The pig feeds the building that houses the pig. This is the kind of example you'd find in Dan Wang's book Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. Wang's central argument is that China is an engineering state, a government led largely by people with engineering backgrounds, who bring that same problem-solving mindset to policy. Like this pig-biogas example, the result is often genuinely innovative. But as Wang also shows, the engineering state can be so focused on solving the technical problem in front of it that it misses the broader human and social costs further down the line.
To wrap this episode, we’re going to zoom out and put this in a much bigger perspective.
Part 6 — What comes next, and at what cost?
Matthew 44:00
Ron Lane has spent 26 years inside this industry. I asked him whether he sees this growth as an obvious good. He considers his farm back in Canada.
Ron 44:21
Well, yes and no… because I have a family farm. It's not big. One time it was big and now it's quite small. It's 2000 sows. People say — that's big, but now it's nothing. I have no influence in the industry, right? But on the other hand, when you get these large farms, if you have a biological problem or a disease problem, these large farms can lose a lot in a short time. Concentration can have a negative effect if there's a problem. It's a topic a lot of people will talk about — what do you do with the small farms? You still have 200 million farmers out there with small farms. You can only put so many people in the city. They've already overbuilt apartments, you can't build more of those. The government wants to encourage these small farms to develop and continue to grow, but they're limited. They don't own the land. It's hard for them to get credit. So they have to look after two entities — the large, structured farms, and you have to look after the mass small farms.
Matthew 45:21
This echoes something we heard in the first episode. China is simultaneously dealing with undernutrition, though much less than before, and diet-related diseases that follow the abundance of industrialized food systems. An interesting detail is that the large farms aren't exactly thriving now. After African Swine Fever, the farms that survived were paid extremely well since supply had dried up. But in the last 8 years, prices have been in decline.
Ron 45:52
Most farms need maybe 14 RMB to break even. The market price is under 11 right now. They're losing money.
Matthew 46:02
Most farms need maybe 14 RMB to break even. The market price is under 11 right now. They’re losing money. So the cost of production is higher than what the market is paying, which is about $2 per kilo of live pig. Ron told me that by the time we were finishing this episode, the market price had dropped further - to 9.79 RMB per kilo. At that price, farms are losing roughly 500 RMB on every single pig they sell. That's about $70 a pig. For a farm marketing 20,000 pigs a year, that's a $1.4 million annual loss. This doesn't translate into less production - it just accelerates the exit of anyone who can't absorb those losses. The big get bigger. The rest get out.
That consolidation pressure doesn't stop at China's borders. Gustavo Oliveira has been watching from the other side of the ocean. From Brazil, where the feed comes from, and he paints a bleak picture.
Gustavo 47:05
The Cerrado - the ecosystem in the Brazilian Central Highlands - is where the brunt of this has taken place. The Cerrado has faced, and continues to face, massive and rapid deforestation. And it’s not just deforestation.
When you're farming 1000s of hectares of a single monoculture, you will have massive pest pressures. A pest will thrive when it's given an endless supply of its own food and no competitors in the rest of the landscape. Similarly with weeds. Brazil has become the largest importer of pesticides. China became the largest exporter of pesticides. That is the other side of this coin of the soy trade, and Brazil drenches its landscapes. The intoxication of workers and people who live in soy regions has been documented, for example, in mother's milk.
It is very difficult, as you can imagine, to do medical research on babies. Mother's milk can just be extracted and donated for research with much less risk, and it is really gut punching to see how babies throughout Brazil were being poisoned by the agrochemicals that drench soybean plantations and others.
There are tree species in the Amazon that can only reproduce by being pollinated by particular kinds of birds. And if these bird species are collapsing because their habitat in the Cerrado has been completely replaced by soybean monocultures, you end up with what we might call zombie trees in the Amazon. The tree is there, it's alive. But after this generation dies out, that's it. That species might go extinct because the pollinators that it requires to reproduce are no longer there.
Matthew 49:50
This vertical pork system produces clear winners and losers.
Gustavo 50:00
Cheap soybean imports from Brazil are great for China's trading companies, agro-industries that crush the bean, that make the livestock feed and the pork industries. Cheap inputs enables them to have higher profits, greater production. But those same cheap imports have driven China's soy farmers effectively into bankruptcy. They've had to switch crops or abandon that kind of agricultural production. Soybeans used to be produced throughout the country. They’re only produced at scale now in the far north east.
Matthew 50:30
The farmers growing the soy in Brazil sell to whoever controls the warehouse. The farmers who used to grow soy in China have largely been priced out. The profits concentrate in the middle of the supply chain. Both the environmental and human costs fall on the people and ecosystems at each end. But Gustavo also sees something else. A different model that once existed, and might again.
Gustavo 51:00
Historically, every Chinese peasant family would have one to no more than five pigs, fed on scraps from their household and leftovers from their crop production. The pigs produced organic fertilizer that people didn't have to pay for. And it was literally a piggy bank for them — so that in a moment of crisis, or when there was a wedding, or something else like that, they could slaughter the pig and sell the meat. When you look at what's happening in China right now, when people demand safer food, there are people, there are local governments, that see the opportunities to rather than doubling down on this agroindustrial system — to try and build up a new version of a diversified farming system in China. Where relatively smaller-scale, local varieties of pigs might be able to actually integrate a production system that doesn't rely on imported feed, that reduces their dependence on imported pesticides and petrochemicals.
Matthew 52:39
That transformation — if it happened — would have consequences far beyond China's borders. A China that ate less pork would reshape soy demand — and with it, land use across an entire continent. There are early signals this is already beginning to shift. In a 2026 report by Systemiq, they estimate soybean imports could fall by 25 to 50% in the coming decades, driven by feed reformulation, improved domestic yields, and the early stages of alternative protein development. But reduced demand in one market doesn't automatically mean less deforestation globally — that's only if the transition is carefully managed. For now though, the direction of travel points elsewhere.
Ron 53:13
Larger farms are getting larger. Just like in America, let's say the US, there's 20 farms that have 70% of the marketplace. In China, you have 20 farms have almost 30% of the marketplace. But they're going to be more of them and bigger, and pretty soon, 20 or 30 farms will have 70% of the pig production in China. And it's the same in the layers. The same in the dairy. It's just bigger farms and more biosecure, more concentrated, more efficient.
Matthew 53:38
The high-rise hog farm — that was born from policy and capital investment and disease outbreaks and a population eating much more animal protein in a single generation — is starting to be exported around the world. A UK-based meat industry consultant, who has spent two decades advising Chinese producers, put it like this: in 20 years, China has done what the Americans took probably 100 years to do. The direction of learning is shifting. Which brings us back to Muyuan Foods and the world's largest pig farmer.
Ron 54:00
He raised money in Hong Kong recently. He wants to develop the industry. And I believe Vietnam, for sure, they started something in Vietnam. I think in the Philippines, maybe in Thailand, they signed some kind of arrangement with CP, which is the largest business, probably, in Thailand. They're expanding, and they're selling their model.
Matthew 54:21
Not all the details are finalized. But the near future will have more high-rise hog farms on the horizon. Whether it's the right answer, well that depends on what question you're asking.
A final reflection
Matthew 54:46
I know people are coming to this episode from very different places. Some of you are vegans. Some of you are livestock farmers. Some of you work in industry or in government. All of that shapes how you hear a story like this. Before this series, I spent several years working on a podcast called Meat: the Four Futures — TABLE's exploration of four different futures for meat and livestock. With those tensions still living in my head, I want to share how I'm thinking about what we've just heard.
Part of what makes this system hard to evaluate is that it has genuinely delivered some things — and genuinely failed at others. The gains and the losses don't cancel each other out. They fall on different people, in different places, at different scales. And where you land depends on what you think matters most. For the urban consumer who wants abundant and affordable pork — this system largely delivers. But this scale, 700 million pigs a year, comes with real vulnerabilities: a deep dependency on imported feed, the risk of a single disease wiping out enormous numbers of animals, and as we heard at the start of this episode, a system designed to keep disease out may also be creating the conditions for new ones to emerge.
For the tens of millions of smallholders who built this industry — this system isn't an answer. It is the problem. They were pushed out not because they failed, but because the government invested in a system designed to replace them.
For the ecosystems on each end of the supply chain, this one doesn't really pass the test. This produces more pork per animal, with less land, and fewer emissions per kilogram of meat. But that system depends on soy feed that is converting ecosystems in Brazil at a scale that no amount of precision farming can offset. In any case, if environmental impact is the real concern, the solutions can't only be about how we produce — but also how much we consume.
This isn't a uniquely Chinese problem. The blueprint for these farms and the playbook of vertical integration came from the United States, the swine genetics arrived from multiple continents, and financing came from global markets. It's a global system, and it will need global answers.
Finally, there's one more dimension that doesn't fit neatly into any of these frames. This, for me, is the clearest physical expression of what people mean when they talk about a factory farm. By design, in a system like this, it's much easier to conceive of these animals as inputs rather than sentient creatures. Remember, at the beginning of this episode, we heard the Chinese character for home depicts a pig living under a roof. Pigs and people together made up the household. What I've been sitting with throughout this series is the question of what it costs when that relationship is replaced by something else entirely. There have been real gains and real losses. Food security improved. Incomes rose. And something that had existed for thousands of years — a particular relationship between people, animals, and land — has shifted. Whether that trade was worth it depends on what you think was lost.
Matthew 57:52
Next week, we follow rice, and what happens when the people who grow it leave the countryside.
Li 57:52
There is this huge generational sacrifice, which is really my parents' generation, who became the first generation of migrant workers and who are still farmers.
Matthew 58:05
That's next time on Feeding One in Six. Thanks so much for listening. If you find this series valuable, the best thing you can do is share it with someone else, and leave us a review wherever you listen. We'll share links to pictures of these high-rise hog farms, and a list of other articles and books that informed this episode can be found on our webpage tabledebates.org.
This series is a collaborative production between the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and TABLE. Supported by National Philanthropic Trust. A huge thanks to the series expert reviewers: Beibei Yin, Carmen Lee, Gustavo Oliveira, Jack Thompson, Jackie Turner and Tara Garnett. This series was produced, edited and hosted by me, Matthew Kessler. Support on mixing and sound design by Martin Palmqvist. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you next week.